The world is falling apart in Disclosure Day, the latest film by Steven Spielberg. People are giving up hope. Wars are brewing, nuclear attacks seem imminent and there is a general, disquieting sense that humanity may have no path forward.
But all of that is happening in the background. We only catch glimpses of it – through headlines and snippets of news anchor reports – enough to glean that we’re in desperate need of saving.
Our story takes us somewhere different – through deep state shadow government conspiracies and cover-ups, extraterrestrial messages and strange psychic powers – but the context in which that happens matters.
It is our world as Spielberg sees it, and addressing that world is the reason he has made Disclosure Day – one of his most moral, spiritual and desperately hopeful films in years.
We follow four characters, dropping us into the middle of their propulsive saga with little time to explain. We first meet Daniel Kellner (Josh O’Connor at his gee-whizziest), a disillusioned employee from the government-adjacent Wardex Corporation who has stolen company secrets and is on the run, determined to share the truth with the world: aliens are real.
He is being chased by Noah Scanlon (Colin Firth), head of Wardex, a cold, Machiavellian figure who believes people will be unable to handle full disclosure. Helping Daniel is Hugo Wakefield (Colman Domingo), a Wardex defector.
And then, at a Kansas City local news station, there is Margaret Fairchild (Emily Blunt), who suddenly finds she can read minds, speak any language and vividly see the path of destiny itself laid out before her.
The film is at once a chase thriller, a conspiracy drama, a first-contact story and a spiritual parable, and Spielberg occasionally has to force those pieces into place. But there is a clarity of feeling beneath the clutter.
O’Connor brings a wide-eyed sincerity that keeps Daniel from becoming just another whistle-blower archetype, while Blunt grounds Margaret’s impossible transformation in fear and bewilderment rather than superhero wonder. Even when the plot thins, the film’s emotional logic is sturdy.
Destiny is a big theme in Disclosure Day. Everything is happening because it is supposed to, which Hugo says again and again – this was always meant to be the day the world finds out, it was always meant to be these two at the centre, and it always had to happen here.
There is a persistent sense of a higher power, beyond even the aliens themselves. Prayer is a motif; religious imagery abounds. One character asks another whether the existence of intelligent life might negate their faith in god. They answer that it only affirms it.
While it rarely feels this devotional, much of Spielberg’s work is in part driven by his search for meaning – what are we all doing here? How do we make sense of the world around us? Why can’t we understand ourselves? But while his films are rooted in the search to know more, he never pretends to have all the answers. Yet there is moral merit in the search itself.
It is hard not to analyse that probing impulse psychobiographically, especially after Spielberg’s 2022 film The Fabelmans, based on his own life. In it, he interrogates his parents’ inability to understand one another, and the misery that followed once they stopped trying and separated for good.
He has even processed that trauma in previous films, even if he didn't realise it at the time. In a 1999 episode of Inside the Actors Studio, host James Lipton brought up 1977’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in which aliens and humanity learn to speak to each other through a combination of music and technology. Lipton noted that Spielberg’s father was a computer scientist and his mother was a musician. Spielberg responded that he had not realised until that very moment that the film was about them.
And that, once again, is where Disclosure Day lands – perhaps more pointedly than ever. When Hugo, the character who has had contact with the aliens, hints at their master plan, he mentions empathy again and again. What ails the world, he believes, is that we are closed off from each other, mistrustful, hoarding secrets and harbouring resentment rather than working together, caught in an endless cycle of violence as a result.
The aliens may have another message, too, but it is not Spielberg’s style to spell it out. There was another instructive moment from him on The Rewatchables podcast, where he talked about a love of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey. Part of the reason Spielberg found the 1968 film so powerful was that it did not spell out its meaning in the end. Instead, he explained, it seemed to implore the viewer to search within.
Disclosure Day does something different. It does not ask us to look within so much as look more clearly at one another. Only when we understand each other, only when humanity is truly connected, can it be possible to hear the message of what comes next.
Important, too, is Spielberg’s role in getting us there. The film is a joy to watch, at times ecstatic, reaching for the kind of awe he felt watching 2001, the kind that made him want to make movies to begin with. In its best moments, it finds it. It is not just spiritual in its themes – when it crescendos, it is a profound experience.
In those moment, Spielberg lets light, sound and faces do the work. That has always been where he is most persuasive. The spectacle matters less than the people looking up at it.
This may be why the film focuses more on the messengers than the message: it is another film about Spielberg himself. That is why it feels in dialogue with so many of his previous films, using moments, techniques and plot elements as shorthand, a culmination of it all. In invoking them, he is interrogating his own struggle to be a better messenger – to use the power of filmmaking to help his audience become better listeners.
The late literary critic Harold Bloom often wrote about the sublime, an idea derived from the Ancient Greek critic Longinus. In The Daemon Knows, Bloom described it as the “incessant demand to transcend the human without forsaking humanism” – and that feels like the goal of Disclosure Day, too.
The film is not flawless. To accommodate its relentless pace, the seams show glaringly at times, the characters feel half-drawn and some of the action set pieces grow so absurd they elicit more smirks than thrills. And yes, Spielberg’s immense skill and keen eye is on better display elsewhere, including in the far more cynical War of the Worlds (2005), which is chock-full of imagery that sears into your mind in service of a cosmic, horrific sort of awe.
Disclosure Day is a film that attempts, instead, through the language of a pulpy popcorn spectacle, to stir the soul.
Seeing that ambition so earnestly on display is perhaps why it moved me. Disclosure Day reaches beyond the human without ever letting go of humanism. It is a film about aliens that insists the real mystery is still us: whether we can listen better, see each other more clearly, and become worthy of whatever comes next.
For all its foibles, it worked on me. And in moments, it reached transcendence. There are few higher compliments than that.
Disclosure Day is in cinemas now across the Middle East
